Free Money Management Template

The new version of the money manager is easier to customize, but many people still prefer the original version because it groups the expenses into separate categories. The most complicated part of using the old version is customizing the budget categories. Luckily, you only need to do this once with maybe a bit of tweaking each year. Essentially, you just need to make sure that the categories are exactly the same in all worksheets.

Video Tutorial (Customizing Budget Categories)
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What you need to watch out for: If you assign a transaction to a category that is not included in the Budget or Report worksheets, the expense won't show up in your reports and you'll think you have more money than you really do. I've added conditional formatting to help prevent these types of mistakes, but the spreadsheet is definitely not error-proof. The conditional formatting just highlights the categories not within the main list.

I've tried very hard to include a comprehensive set of income and expense categories, so if customizing the categories is too scary, just try to use the default list.

I intend to write more on this subject in the future. For now, you can learn about creating a budget in almost any personal finance book, reading online blog articles on budgeting, etc. See the article How to Make a Budget and read through these 5 Budgeting Tips.

The second most difficult part of using the money management template is learning to enter transactions into the Transaction worksheet correctly and efficiently. If you have a good understanding of how to copy, insert, and delete rows, it should be a piece of cake. It is very important that you always copy entire rows (instead of inserting blank rows) so that you preserve the formatting, data validation, and formulas that are both visible and contained in hidden columns.

For recurring bills, you can copy the rows for older transactions, then insert the copied rows and change the dates and amounts. You can also create a subset of rows to use for copying/pasting with the amounts left blank (so that these template rows don't affect the account balances).

Can I use Autofiltering? Yes. First select the entire transactions table and then turn on Autofilter. You may find it convenient to use filtering to display transactions for a single Account at a time when you are reconciling.

Can I import transactions from my bank? Unfortunately, no. The money management template is not quite that fancy. I also have no plans in the future to add the ability to automatically import transactions from your bank or other financial institution. There is no online connectivity built into the money manager. If you want that kind of functionality, you may want to use some other dedicated budget software.

If you are saving up for a vacation, car purchase, down payment, or some other future goal you may want to keep track of how much money in your savings account is allocated to those specific goals.

One of the simple ways to do that is to create something called a "Virtual Sub-Account" which means that you aren't actually creating a real sub-account with your bank. Instead, you create an account called "Vacation" or "Car" in the Accounts tab of the money management template. You can indent the description or add a note to the right of the table to remind you that it is a sub-account.

Although in real life you would be transferring money from your checking account to your main savings account, in the spreadsheet you record these savings allocations as transfers to the specific sub-accounts.

The tricky part is that when you are reconciling your spreadsheet with your bank statement, you need to remember that the total balance shown on the statement is the sum of the general account plus the sub-accounts.

A very important part of good money management is keeping track of how your current spending compares to your budget. You might check your budget status on a weekly or even daily basis, but you should at least manage your money on a monthly basis.

Use the Report worksheet to compare your budget to your actual spending throughout the month. You can change the month by simply entering the month number (1 for January, 2 for February, etc).

The money manager is designed for showing yearly reports, so I typically start a new file at the beginning of each year, saving the old file with my previous year's tax documents.

For the new year, you can delete the old transactions then add rows at the top of the transactions table to list the carry-over balances for each account.

Tip: Just like with recurring payments, you may want to save a subset of sample transactions so that you can remember what categories to use for common transactions. For the sample transactions, leave the amounts blank so that they don't affect the account balances.